How to Argue With a Racist
History, Science, Race and Reality
Adam Rutherford
Having read it
★★★★★
A seriously good read that is full of insight and facts presented with honesty (and a bit of humour) that really helps tell the realities of science and genetics, especially for us non-science people.
As Adam says at the end of its introduction . . .
[...] this book is a tool – a weapon – to be brandished when science is warped, misrepresented or abused to make a point, or to justify hatred.
. . . which prove it will make a good addition to being used, alongside similar forward-thinking titles, in and around contemporary times and issues so as all can better understand and see how language and subjects cans and do often get used for misbegotten aims.
A good passage
What we can also say with an arsenal of scientific ammunition is that though skin colour is the first and most obvious way we see humans, it’s a superficial route to an understanding of human variation, and a very bad way to classify people. Our view of reality, so profoundly limited, has been co-opted into a deliberate political lie. We say ‘black’ when what we mean is ‘recently descended from a continent that has more genetic diversity and pigmentation diversity than anywhere else on Earth’.
A second good passage
The fudging of the data to say that you are ‘40 per cent British, 25 per cent German and 35 per cent Greek’ or some other combination is confusing to me, and it doesn’t indicate the number or relation of the ancestors who have longer-standing Greek heritage. A more accurate result would say ‘despite the fact that your genome has significant genetic contribution from people who have recent geographical association with the modern nation states of Germany and Greece, though we can’t be sure which of your ancestors these were, your family tree spreads all over Europe and, to a lesser but still significant extent, indeed the world. However, you remain 100 per cent British because that is how citizenship is legally determined. Genetics won’t change that.’ Admittedly that is an unpithy marketing campaign, and perhaps a less desirable product to give as a Christmas present.
A third good passage
We celebrate the fact that science is an endeavour built upon past knowledge with the maxim that ‘we see further by standing in the shoulders of giants’. We must also be aware of the centuries of pseudoscience perpetrated by men of power on whose shoulders we also stand, because their ideas have percolated through time, and persist within science and society to this day, no matter how offensive, out of date or absurd they might be. The sweet irony is that the whole science of human genetics was founded by racists in a time of racism, and singularly has become the field that has demonstrated the scientific falsity of race. As a result, the foundations of racism cannot be drawn from science.